US soldiers in Iraq are giving nicknames and forming emotional bonds with bomb-defusing robots they have come to regard as team-mates, according to the founder of iRobot, the company that invented the machines.
Autonomous software agents are rapidly moving from the development stage to providing industrial-strength help in everyday environments. Gartner forecasts that enterprise automation, which includes autonomous software agents and artificial intelligence software, will account for almost 50 per cent of total IT spending in 10 years.
Dr. James Martin believes that the "alien" intelligence of next-generation computers is better able to detect and take independent decisions to forestall terror attacks.